


playlist

by crimson_noir



Category: Cyberpunk 2077 (Video Game), Polygon Cyberpunk Red, Polygon/McElroy Vlogs & Podcasts RPF
Genre: 5 Times, Angst, Found Family, M/M, Mutual Pining, Pining, so much pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-28
Updated: 2020-06-28
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:53:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24958684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crimson_noir/pseuds/crimson_noir
Summary: Four times Vang0 looks at Burger, and the one time Burger looks back.
Relationships: Vang0 Bang0/Burger Chainz
Comments: 28
Kudos: 78





	playlist

**Author's Note:**

> First foray into this very niche fandom, hope it's good.

_call me **zero/zero/zero** _

“You’re our couple,” Dasha says into the manufactured quiet of her apartment, and Vang0 doesn’t really know what she means by that, because he’s working on jumptrash and really, _really_ does not want to be disturbed. He’s working on marketing now, having given up on the fucking M House with all their drama, palettes and what _ever_ , it’s their loss they didn’t want him on the team. He’s the best at eyeshadow on the forums, they’re just threatened. It’s obvious.

Burger comes over, and he’s carrying bowls of stew on a wooden tray. (Where does Dasha get wooden trays from, this is Night City—) It’s steaming hot and he can see it’ll be good and jumptrash can be done a bit later. It’s always updated to be the best it possibly can, so he can take some time off for food. A notification on his agent catches his eye, and he swipes it away.

“Eat, would you,” Burger says, and Dasha raises an eyebrow and stops her monologue to take a bowl off the tray.

“Were any of you listening?”

“No,” answers Vang0 bluntly.

“There was a job,” volunteers Burger.

“Lovely,” smiles Dasha, and he really is in awe of how sarcastic she can be sometimes, but it’s not like he’ll be telling her. Ever. He’s too busy to, and they don’t really talk about emotions. He spoons the stew in his mouth so he can stop thinking about things, and it burns his tongue.

They let him swear for a few moments. Burger puts down his bowl and scoots closer on the sofa. “Ice?”

“I’m fine,” he says, because he is, and he doesn’t need ice, and he can’t quite figure out why Burger had raised his hand like that, like he wanted to ~~comfort Vang0, no too improbable, who does that kind of stuff~~ do something with it. Kind of like a prolonged twitch. 

Dasha rolls her eyes, and he can see her biting away her words. Does he want to hear what she wanted to say? Yes. Is he thankful that she didn’t say it? Infinitely, because she knows way more about him than she should. He doesn’t resent her for it, she’s a fixer, and the best damn one in the business, but he wishes, sometimes, that she didn’t.

“Stew tastes really good, Burgs.”

Burger smiles, his metal jaw catching the light from Dasha’s floor lamp. It’s the only light on in the room, because the windows are fortified glass, light from the city streaming in through them. What’s really intriguing is the absence of the light, of all the dark skyscrapers that just loom over the rest. There’s theories they’re all owned and run by Trauma Team, but he thinks that’s just Hypo. It’s a thing to see, though, all the broken windows and the shimmering glass. If he were a person thirty years ago, he wouldn’t have imagined the future to be like this.

Or maybe he would have. He doesn’t know himself, doesn’t remember a huge part of his life, so what monopoly does he have over an alternate version of himself? (He hopes the alternate version’s intelligent. And that he has people who like him.)

“It’ll taste better when you don’t burn your tongue on it,” Burger says softly, and Vang0 comes back to the room. It’s weird how Burger does that to him, makes his vision sharper, makes him remember ~~who~~ where he is.

He’s not complaining.

Dasha’s bowl clinks when she sets it down on her small coffee table, and Vang0 closes his eyes as Burger looks away. “There’s a job, and we have to dress all up for it.”

Huh. “Where are we getting the stuff from?”

“I’ve got my sources.”

“So, what you’re saying is that there’s a party.” Burger’s finished his bowl of stew already, and he’s looking at Dasha with his head cocked to the right, and Vang0’s happy about it, because it means that he can look at the curve of Burger’s neck—metal melting into skin like the magic he read about in the children’s books kept in the small bookshelves at Hypo’s place while Burger volunteered last week, a hundred years ago—without Burger catching him at it.

This is just him trying to think prettily. Really, Burger’s skin and metal meet in the remnants of angry stitches and he wonders sometimes if Burger was the one to fix himself up. It’s old scar tissue now, and he thinks about a younger Burger standing in front of the mirror, bleeding, tearing at the seams, so that he doesn’t think about kissing it better. It’s a vicious circle though, and he looks away to Dasha just so that some of it can stop.

Dasha’s looking straight back at him and there’s a ‘finally’ in the way her tone changes for a second. He hasn’t been listening for a while now, and he’s glad she hasn’t said anything. “It’s next weekend, at one of the high-end residential places.”

“I can’t do the fancy stuff,” Burger tells the room.

“You’re just arm candy, honey,” Dasha answers. “You and Vang0’re distraction. Nothing much for you to do.”

“Oh, good,” says Burger, and it is so damn terrible, how he wants to cross the extra inches on the sofa and tuck himself into Burger’s side. It’s a disease. He finishes his stew slowly just so he has something to do with his hands, and he doesn’t want to think about them at whatever fancy party they’ll be at, doesn’t want to imagine dancing slowly together, old-fashioned. (He’ll probably think about Burger in a suit. He can’t stop himself from that, he’s not a saint, he’s just got to make sure there’s no audience.)

“We’ve got to get the act together.” Dasha doesn’t look somewhere like her nails as she says this, makes it clear it’s for him, and that’s one of the reasons he’ll always love her, because she’s blunt and she’s straightforward and she knows how to talk to him without them both breaking. Also, she’s more badass than he could ever hope to be. 

“Yeah,” he says, because it was directed at him, and he doesn’t want to look at Burger any more than he already has, and doesn’t want to think about them walking into one of those huge rooms, all lit up, doesn’t want to think about how he’ll be so very good at ‘acting,’ doesn’t want to think about how vulnerable he’ll be. “I—yeah. I’ve gotta go, uh, stream now, so—Vang0 Bang0.”

And he leaves.

_do you got room for **one** more troubled soul_

“Missed you,” Burger is saying. He’s driving, too, and Vang0 is draped across his lap, not doing what he’s supposed to be doing because Keanu’s taking care of it. Maybe it’s somehow exposing his feelings, choosing to fucking sit on Burger’s lap when the van can drive itself through the apocalypse, but he’s tired and he doesn’t care. At least for now. 

“Didn’t go anywhere,” he says on auto-pilot, but it’s too emotional to be on auto-pilot. He’s careless like this, in the van with just the two of them, which is just so stupid, because it’s _just the two of them_. There’s no one to distract from Vang0 and his obvious, obvious feelings. He feels so obvious about it sometimes, like everything he says is an admission and every touch a confession. (People used to have churches, back in the day, where they could go talk to God or whatever, it was all highly useless, but he thinks about temples when he looks at the shape of Burger’s hands, and he’ll never know anything more divine than these times. This silence when he’s almost, _almost_ sure that everything he’s thinking can be heard on the other side. People used to have mosques, back in the day, they used to pray, and Vang0 wonders if what he’s feeling now and what they felt was the same.)

“Missed you anyway,” Burger says, and he’s so flippant about it, so carefree, like he didn’t just make Vang0’s brain light up while his heart fought to catch up, like he’s used to feeling. Vang0 doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to missing Burger.

He misses Burger every day these days, and it’s a physical thing sometimes, a thing filling up his chest, brimming up to the top of his head. It’s like it wants to let Burger know, and sometimes he thinks about spelling out his thoughts in code somewhere Burger will never see, just to get it out somewhere, but he always decides against it. So he misses Burger privately, and maybe not entirely unintentionally (those muscles are mind-blowing, and he’s only human), and it’s a hard existence. Yeah, it’s bad, and it’s intrusive, but Vang0 knows worse things with the word ‘intrusive’ attached to them, and he’s glad they don’t bother him as much anymore. It’s all because of these feelings. Burger Chainz, the perpetual bodyguard, protecting him from his own mind. (Saving him without even knowing it, that’s such a Burger thing.)

People on his forums know Burger by now, and traffic has increased a bit. They all call anything overly kind or strong a ‘Burger Chainz’ thing, and well. It might be possible that Vang0’s upset that he didn’t think of it first. Burger had grinned and kissed the top of Vang0’s head when he’d found out, completely unaware of the sirens going on in Vang0’s head. It had been a good stream, everyone had aww-ed in the chat, and he’d had to do some breathing exercises while setting up Sixnite to get the blush down before Burger noticed the chat noticing it.

He’d messed up a lot, and had been, according to the chat, ‘a total cutie.’ Burger had called him baby at some point, and he’d just about combusted. It had been good content.

He shifts up in his place so that he can put his head on Burger’s shoulder, and hook an arm loosely around his shoulders. It’s almost like cuddling would be, but he can blame it on the car now. (Shotgun’s empty, but he’s blaming it on the car.) The side of his face is all smashed up against the line of Burger’s neck, and he can feel Burger breathing, and normally this would be too much. Normally, Vang0 would be sitting shotgun, normally Vang0 wouldn’t dare spend so long silently while so close together, normally he’d be streaming with the camera out of the window, whooping at the sky. 

There’s something about this day.

He’s too tired, maybe it’s that. Maybe it’s the fact that they just saw a shit ton of bodies. Maybe it’s the way that he’s been trying to minimize contact lately, and this is just his body taking over his brain in a revolt because it’s unable to function without Burger contact. Maybe it’s just the van, maybe Keanu’s responsible for all this using some random AI codes that alter brain function.

The possibility of that last thing’s so funny he almost grins. It sounds like some old rumour that’d gain a lot of traction in the 2010s, like a weird scratchy loop from some forgotten pop song. When he’s done listing all the pop songs he can think of, he finds he’s been unconsciously stroking his fingers in circles on the back of Burger’s neck. He doesn’t stop, because his eyes are drawn to his fingers brushing against the short hair like Burger’s arm would be to a strong magnet. He’s so fixated on it that he doesn’t recognize that the van’s stopped. It’s softer than he’d have expected.

Burger turns his head, his eyes closed, and they’re even closer, so close that it hurts, and he’s not thinking when he uses his free hand to unlock the door and fall out as if by accident. It’s quick, and he lands on his side, but it doesn’t hurt as much.

“Vang0, are you hurt?”

He gets up, winces more at the concern in Burger’s voice than the fall, and shakes his head. “I’m, uh, fine. Messed up on opening the door there.”

“Should I get the first aid box?”

He doesn’t think about Burger pulling his shirt up softly to look at the bruise, doesn’t think about the dim lights and cramped space, doesn’t think about the fact that Burger could get him high, and doesn’t think about how fucking _beautiful_ Burger looks when he’s high.

“I’m really fine,” he answers. Looks at the ground and smiles, because how stupid is all this? Falling out of vehicles and holo jackets and almost kisses. Always lovely, never quite enough. He’s greedy. “Should’ve streamed that, jumptrash would’ve gotten a good laugh.” 

_do you need someone, do you need a new me?/cause i’ve got **two** or three _

“You’re a mess,” Dasha tells him when they’re flicking through the garment racks at some high end store whose floors he can see his reflection in. Funny thing is, they blend right in. No one really seems to care how they’re dressed as long as they have the money to stand in the store, and he’s caught a few salesgirls giving his contour appreciative looks. (Dasha’s acquired a whole parade of appreciative salespersons, and she does not care. This place is going to be a wasteland of broken hearts by the time they leave.)

He doesn’t deny it. “I try not to think around him.”

“An utter mess,” she emphasizes, and makes a face at a suit which is one of the latest and most expensive in the store. (There’s no accounting for rich Night City taste.)

He tries to change the subject. “What’ll you be wearing?”

“The skulls of all the men who have tried to evade topics around me,” she says, deadpan. “With really nice heels.”

“Cool outfit.” You’re not intimidated, you’re not intimidated, you’re _not_ , she’s not the boss of you. With that in mind, he says, “I’m not in love with Burger.” He realizes his mistake the second he makes it, and suppresses the urge to bury his face in a dress and scream. 

“Thank you for giving me all the info I need.”

“You fixer,” he sighs.

“That’s my profession, yes. Yours, it seems, is government-mandated piner.”

“That’s not a word, and the government doesn’t really exist anymore.” Weak comeback.

“No denials there, I see.”

“I’d be a fool to lie that much. I’m not really good at it.”

She raises an eyebrow. “I’d never know. One would think I don’t remember the bathroom incident at Hypo’s.”

He sighs again. “I’m never going to live that down.”

“None of us are.”

The fabric under his fingers is soft enough to be a very good bedsheet, and it’s part of some flowy jacket-shirt thing that he doesn’t really like, but the fabric’s good. It’s all deep red and slightly shimmery, not enough shimmer to be gaudy, but enough to be party. It’s a golden accessory kind of outfit, but it’s not his thing. Dasha’s waiting for him to talk, and he’s looking at a shirt-jacket monstrosity like it’ll save his life.

“You know it already,” he says after a pause. “Don’t make me say it out loud.”

“Why not?”

Because then it’ll be official. Because then it’ll consume my life all over the thousandth time. Because then I’ll feel like it’s stamped all over me in neon, all the time. Because then something might change between us, more than it already has, and I don’t know if he’ll like me for that. Because I don’t know if he’ll like me, ever.

She picks up a dramatic black gown with a plunging neckline and a ruffled skirt and scrutinizes it. “Okay, then don’t.”

Another reason to love Dapper Dasha: you don’t have to ask her to read your mind.

The silence stretches too long, and she’s looking at the combat boots she’s wearing like she might just pair them with the gown, which would be a look and all, but it’s a silence which is definitely existing to manipulate the hell out of him, and he does not like that. Nope, he is not talking.

He pulls up jumptrash and starts streaming instead, and the filter over Dasha has given her blonde hair and dark skin and large red eyes. He throws up the VB, and the red eyes roll so smoothly that chat’s swooning. Dasha has this way to make people worship her, and it’s good for a content creator like him.

“We’re buying fancy clothes today,” he informs everyone, and chat throws up a ton of emojis back at him. “At this place uptown, and it’s really nice. I don’t think I can name it, but it’s got very shiny floors and all. Vang0 Bang0.”

He gives chat a mini-tour of the place and they ooh and ahh over everything, and they’re asking him to model each outfit they see, which is why he doesn’t really take it seriously until _all_ of them, as a collective, begin talking about some ‘blue flowy dress.’ The same message, with different variants of ‘please wear it please wear it,’ over and over again. When he gets back to Dasha, they’re still asking him to wear it.

“Give the people what they want, I’ll film,” she says, and that’s when he realizes that she does watch his streams. It had just been a vague suspicion before.

“I haven’t even seen the dress in question,” he tells chat, and can’t see the responses because Dasha’s picked out this deep blue thing which flows like liquid or something, hanging in the air like it’s animation. It’s got a beaded neck and it’s sleeveless, and he doesn’t hate it. It looks like it’ll look good.

Scratch that, it looks stunning. It looks like it’s made of something else and he wants to figure it out so badly, but he wants to wear it more.

“Okay chat, good pick. I see what you were talking about. I’m kind of scared to touch it, and it’s gorgeous.”

So he goes to the changing rooms, and doesn’t even have to work to put it in because there are special robots for that, apparently, and they put it on properly and adjust the neck and the way it falls and drapes around him. It’s childish, but he keeps his eyes closed throughout the whole process because he wants to be surprised by how he looks. 

When it’s done, there’s a cute little beep, and he opens his eyes to see himself in the mirror, but is distracted by Burger in the background, who’s looking at a mannequin with an expression Vang0 can’t figure out. Vang0 knows he looks good, but he doesn’t really care now, because Burger’s wearing this old denim jacket and he’s running his hands through his stupid hair and it doesn’t matter that the dress looks like he’s wearing what the stars used to look like. Not when Burger’s looking like that after a morning of driving the van or whatever. It’s just so unfair, and it’s so perfect-chaos-beautiful that Vang0 wants to rip his own hair out and sink to the ground laughing. It’s such a whole Thing that he wants to run away just to feel something else, anything else, and he could stand here forever and keep looking.

He could die ecstatic just looking at Burger, and it’s all a disaster. 

_i would get messed up, weigh one fifty- **three**_

It’s been so many years, and so many technological advancements, but hospital chairs are still uncomfortable. He knows that they used to be uncomfortable because every single old TV show focused on that, and he knows they’re uncomfortable at present because they have enough money for hospitals now (who would’ve known), and the plastic is digging into his skin painfully.

It’s okay. It’s not a lot of pain.

He feels like an overused cliché left alone with his thoughts, but Dasha’s gone to talk to the doctors, and Burger’s lying unconscious on the hospital bed. That’s a thing that’s happening. Vang0 doesn’t think he knows how to process it, so he’s just looking at the sheets tucked into the metal frame of the bed, because he’s looked at the bandages enough, and he knows that he’ll be seeing them again when he falls asleep. It’s as simple as one plus one.

Okay. It’s not that they have enough money for hospitals, but Burger was hurt, and Vang0 is probably in shock, and has been since he saw Burger take that last hit, and so none of them were really capable of thinking about their finances. He trusts Dasha to take care of it, because he hasn’t been able to do a thing for a while now.

(The last thing he said was him informing the team that he wasn’t really good at cool combat stuff, and the last thing he remembers doing—decisive action, action and reaction—was turning off the stream and calling help. He knows Burger heard him turn off the stream without even a VB for signoff. He doesn’t know if Burger knows that declarations of love are made like that. He thinks chat might.

It’s one of the first times he thinks he doesn’t really care if they do.)

They put a shock blanket around his shoulders, crackly tinfoil that matched his sneakers on one side, and a sharp, eye-watering orange on the other. It hadn’t really done anything, and he’d managed to cut his finger on the jagged edge. That had helped, looking at the small red cut, and wondering how much worse it was for Burger. (It hadn’t helped.) He’d worn it for eighty-seven seconds, and then it had fallen off. Gravity. It works for you when you least need it to.

It’s useless to keep looking at the sheets, because the white blankness of them unnerves him too much to be a good thing, and he’s already jittery. His vision slides up, and he takes it slow, because shock, while harmless, is still not something to be messed around with. Dasha wouldn’t like it if she came back to the room to find him in a boneless heap on the floor. He takes it slow, from the top of the hospital bed, and he’d love to take it slow in a thousand other rooms, in a million other ways, but you’ve got to make do with what you’ve got, and you’ve got to make peace with what you’ll never have.

Keep breathing, chat would say. And then someone’d post a hell lot of those puppy eyes emojis, and Burger would forget about moderating and join in, and Vang0’d keep streaming with three-quarters of his mind on the chat squealing excitedly at Burger and all of it on Burger’s smile while squealing back. Inhale, exhale. Sometimes he thinks there has to be at least one therapist watching his streams. Sometimes he thinks that it’d be good if they were a fan, and then he could maybe get therapy for free. That would be good, but it would also be a disaster, because he knows if given a room which swears to never let any of his words out of it, all he’d talk about would be Burger.

It’s a problem.

Burger’s hair is messed up even more so than usual, because there’s a mullet and there’s an overgrown mullet littered with gravel, and Vang0 wants to wash it all clean, wants to spend hours on it as they sit in silence or as Burger talks about the new friend he made or what he’s going to make for dinner because the hair is dirty, okay, and it _shouldn’t_ be like that even though it sometimes is, because Burger doesn’t seem to care about his hair a lot but it’s still soft, it’s always soft, because it’s Burger’s hair—

When Dasha comes in, there are tears on his cheeks and his fists are balled up tight, nails digging into his palms. 

_‘cause i’m a supernova/and you’re my **four** -leaf clover _

“You’re my lucky charm, Burger!” Vang0 exclaims in the middle of laughing hysterically, half falling out of Burger’s lap onto the controls, fresh off of a dramatic car chase which they’d won mostly due to the bullets Dasha was shooting from the boat at the back of the van. She’d aimed for the tyres, and most of them didn’t quite hit where they were supposed to, but they were free. And they have money.

“Pretty sure the employer’s going to agree with that,” she says, clambering out through the back. “I need a drink.”

Vang0’s high on adrenaline, and he’s been laughing for so long he’s past the point where it hurts his cheeks and the ceiling of his stomach, _way_ past that point into the place where everything’s blurred and dizzy, just good enough to be like a montage, like an advertisement, like a dream fever trip, like a really good video game, like what discos taste like, all flashing lights and sound. Times like these are kind of dangerous, because it’s like he can just fly away into somewhere where it’s all faster, but Burger’s there.

(Sometimes he thinks that the past him must’ve been experiencing something like this, and had no one to hold him back from the worse parts of it. He’s glad for the amnesia then, because he doesn’t want to remember a life with no one to anchor him.)

He’s been staring at Burger for so long it’s a crime, thinking of hooking his arms around that neck and licking the glitter off of his cheekbones and falling into a mistake in the back of the van. It’d be good, it’d be fantastic, and the risk is too great, but he allows himself to think about it anyway. Just for a minute, nothing too blasphemous. Just the thought of the illegal V that leads down to the shape of his hips because he wore his towel slung too low a few days ago, and Vang0 had had to breathe very deeply for half an hour to cope. 

“Burger,” says Burger, smiling, and Vang0 laughs harder.

“You’re doing it on purpose now,” he accuses, and shifts so that he’s leaning against the van door, because if an almost-kiss situation happens again, he doesn’t think he’ll be able to control himself. “You’re _seriously_ not making that same mistake again.”

“Anything to make you smile,” drawls Burger, and Vang0’s heart stops in his chest. Burger’s eyes are closed, and his head is resting against the seat. It seems like he meant it, but Vang0 doesn’t really know if he meant it in the way Vang0’s wanted to hear it for ever. He doesn’t want to hope, either, he doesn’t want to flatten his hand against Burger’s chest and he doesn’t want to think that it’d be okay to lean up and lean in and not think about or touch anything other than Burger for a while. 

So he just keeps looking, doesn’t say anything, and hopes Burger gets it as a thank you. He probably does, because he’s the one of them who knows how emotions work, and the only one of them who has the capacity to be mildly good at them. He knows Burger gets him when he begins to hum some old song that Vang0 doesn’t know, and when the van begins to softly play it in the background. This is how Vang0 Bang0 comes back to earth, he thinks idly, this is how you calm a mess down.

(“Your co-dependent shit is unnerving,” Dasha had said once, and he hadn’t told her that it’s way more co-dependent than she knows. Not then. He’s now curious if she knew it.) 

“You’re tired,” Burger says quietly, and it’s all so comfortable.

“Mm hmm. Wanna sleep.” He doesn’t close his eyes though, because he’s looking at the bottom of the metal jaw, at the jacket tossed in the next seat, the one with metal spikes on the shoulders, put away so that they can’t hurt themselves on it. It’s then that he realizes that he’s an idiot. He’s such an incalculable idiot, how had he not realized this before? It’s everywhere around him.

“I’m not moving,” Burger tells the van, and begins carding his fingers through Vang0’s hair in soft, repetitive motions, and Vang0 _knows_. Why didn’t you fucking tell me, he wants to ask, why are you so quiet, why the hell are you doing this to yourself—but he doesn’t, because he knows why. Sometimes you have to keep things tucked in, because it just seems better that way.

“Goodnight, Vang0.” 

They can sort this out in the morning.

_but I would walk **five** hundred miles/and i would walk **five** hundred more/just to be the man who walks a thousand miles/to fall down at your door_

When he wakes up, he’s lying on the mattress in the back of the van, and Burger is sleeping next to him. They’ve got their sides slotted together loosely, almost-puzzle-pieces, and it’s not normal because Vang0 doesn’t sleep in the night most of the time, doesn’t tend to sleep, just crashes after a couple of days running without a pause. It’s not usual because they’ve never slept on the mattress together, even though the van has only one—whenever Burger sleeps, Vang0 streams, or gets intel for the latest job, or talks to Dasha. No, not really.

He mostly allows himself to yearn in those times, builds up scenarios in his head.

And when Vang0 crashes, he doesn’t know what happens, other than the fact that he wakes up to the van around him. Now, when he’s thinking about it with newly collected data, he feels that (yes, the _data_ that is the precise catch of Burger’s breath last night, the look in his eye when he looks back, the little encouragements he leaves on the stream, the way he’s the one to wrap the blankets around Vang0, the one to make him what he likes for breakfast, the one who looks at him like _that_ each morning without fail, the way he’s the one—) he might have been very, very foolish. 

So he decides it’s okay to be foolish just a little more, so he can remember the feeling. He does a lot of things just so that he can remember them later. He moves away from Burger slowly, rolls off the mattress. When he’s at the van door, he can feel Burger watching him.

“Be back soon,” he says, and it’s like he can hear Burger smiling.

“I know you will,” Burger says, and Vang0 walks out into the early warmth of Night City. The place is a dim, bright hum around him, but he doesn’t stop to walk around. He wants Dasha’s windows.

The door opens for his eye, and the living room is silent. He can hear silent thwacks coming from the spar room, which means she’s probably trying to get some new martial art under her thumb. She’s probably going to modify it so that it fights for her, just like what she does with people. Vang0 doesn’t quite know if she’s done that to him, or if she hasn’t, but he’s grateful nonetheless. Not that he’ll ever tell her.

The windows are sparkling clean and they’ve got the same view as before, but the sun is rising over the old, broken skyscrapers, making the empty windows sparkle. Maybe in the other life, he’d be able to construct some complex metaphor out of it, make it seem more meaningful, more connected to his life as it goes. Maybe if he hadn’t lost his memory, he’d know exactly what they were for, and what happened to them. But now, as it stands, he’s just a guy looking out at a harmless source of beauty, thinking about someone he loves.

“You’re our couple,” Dasha says from somewhere behind him, and it’s all déjà vu from a week or so ago, but now that it’s all easy, glowing code in his head, he just breathes out.

“I guess we are.” He can see the van from the windows, too, and he can see Burger in his mind’s eye. Maybe it’s all that matters right now. “Thanks, Dash. Uh, I think I should be leaving now.”

She’s leaning against a doorframe, and makes a face of mock-surprise. “Really?”

“Yeah, yeah, you told me so.” He walks over to the apartment door, and doesn’t try to stop himself from flying down the stairs, because the elevator is too damned slow, some antiquated thing from the 2020s, and this is not the kind of moment he intends to waste on things from twenty years ago.

When he’s out of the place, Burger’s standing near the van, and his face is all lit up by the new sunlight, but Vang0 knows he’s what looking at. Knows who he’s looking at. (Looking back on it all, Burger’s kind of a simple guy. Maybe he was always looking, and Vang0 never noticed, because he’s always five minutes behind when it comes to his feelings.)

“You’re beautiful,” Burger tells him, and Vang0—well, Vang0 is so infatuated he could float. They’re so close it’s crazy he’s not turning on his heels and running, but Burger’s looking at him, and saying he’s beautiful, and how the hell do you respond to that. It’s like there’s a huge bubble of warmth in his chest, and that he’s just going to combust with all of the things he wants to say. “Missed you.”

What else can he do except for pulling him down by his collar and sealing their lips together? 

It’s hurried and breathless, and Vang0 _finally_ puts his arms around Burger’s neck, _finally_ swallows down the little noises he makes, _finally_ commits the taste of his lips to memory, _finally_ gropes him like he’s been waiting to do for ages before he gasps for breath. (Burger looks like he’s been hit by a train. It’s a good look on him. Everything’s a good look on him.) The whole goddamn street can definitely hear the famously emotionless Dapper Dasha whooping from her windows, but Vang0 doesn’t really care. 

“Didn’t go anywhere,” he says, and Burger lifts him off his feet so that they can kiss again. 

**Author's Note:**

> Songs mentioned:  
> Zero Zero - Gerard Way  
> Alone Together - Fall Out Boy  
> Clean Slated Slate - The Altogether  
> Smithereens - Twenty One Pilots  
> Glitter & Crimson - All Time Low  
> I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles) - The Proclaimers
> 
> Hope you liked reading it! I'm @crimson-noir on tumblr.


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